Probation (14 page)

“Tired?” he asked.

“No,” I said, lying.

He wasn’t interested in talking with his friends at the bar, dismissing the drunk who wanted to argue Ted Williams’s claim as the Greatest Living Ball Player. He ordered another shot and a beer to chase it. “Asshole,” he muttered. “Just another goddamn jerk running his goddamn mouth about things he doesn’t know shit about.”

“Your teachers think you’re real smart,” he said, firing up another smoke. “Father Gillen too.”

He told the bartender to pull him another draft and bring another Coke for his son. I sat up straight on my stool and nodded at the bartender, making sure there was no mistaking I was that son and this was my dad.

“I bet you can be anything you want to be. A doctor. A lawyer. An engineer.”

He ground his cigarette out in the ashtray.

“Don’t ever let me see you pick up a baseball bat again or I’ll break both your hands.”

It’s getting on for eleven Friday night and I’m sitting at the bar of the Carousel, again, nursing a beer, furious with Matt, angry with myself for telling him that goddamn story. I should have known that fucking priest would never understand, that he’d make some stupid comment.

“You must have been very frightened when your father threatened you like that,” he said, expecting revelations and catharsis.

Frustrated, mad, rejected. Those were the emotions my father could arouse, not frightened. He could pop and sputter, his face a virtual pyrotechnic display while he bellowed like a wounded ox. He might give my backside a gentle whack or drop a soft knuckle rap on my skull. Once he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me until my eyes rolled back in my head, not because he was angry, but because he was terrified when I absorbed a brutal shock after sticking a screwdriver into an electrical outlet. But he never hit me. Not once. Never. Corporal punishment was strictly a maternal duty.

I order another Heineken, wondering what ever happened to those goddamn baseballs. They sat on my bedside table until I left for college. I’m growing more tolerant of the ordained clergy as my blood alcohol level rises After all, Father Gillen had proven to be a sage counselor. The old man quickly forgot his prohibition when I begged to join the Gastonia Little Cherokees a few weeks after we returned from Clearwater. I threw like a girl, dropped every ball, and flailed at the plate, but not one of my teammates dared to taunt or mock me or even snicker behind my back, fearing the wrath of their fathers who gathered to watch the graceful arc of my old man’s swing as he shagged fly balls to their sons. They were awestruck by his stillness at the plate, mesmerized by his power, spellbound by the sound of one ball after another being smacked into the outfield. Bullshit, he spat, his anger startling an admirer who told him he could have been another DiMaggio.

I never graduated to Pony League, moving on to solitary endeavors like the swimming pool and the speed bag. I grew bigger and stronger while my father slowly faded away. He looked odd in his new glasses, almost bookish; his face gradually seemed to shrink behind the ever-thickening lenses of stronger and stronger prescriptions. Eventually he couldn’t go out in the daylight without sunglasses and, finally, his driver’s license was revoked, making him dependent on my mother.

The last time I saw him wear dress shoes was when he danced at Regina’s wedding. From then on, it was slippers and white socks until he lost his right foot to gangrene. He worked hard at his rehab, insisting he’d learn to walk without a limp or a hobble, but never succeeding before they told him they needed to take the leg below the knee. The procedure was a success. He was recovering nicely. His vital organs, battered by years of exposure to high glucose levels, had withstood the trauma better than had been expected. You’ll be in skilled nursing when I come back next weekend, I promised, the crisis over, the obligations of Tar Heel Heritage beckoning. He was sitting up in bed, leaning forward, his gown dropped to his waist. I rubbed his bare shoulders, no muscle left to massage, just flaps of loose skin that yielded under the gentle pressure of my hands. Look at that, I said, as the Phillies All-Star lefty first baseman launched a magnificent opposite field three-run bomb, dooming the Braves to their fourth loss in a row. Turn it off, he said, I want to go home. Soon, I promised. Later that night, he was restless, unable to sleep, complaining he was cold, his gown damp with sweat. He insisted the staff turn up the lights in his room, trying to keep the dark at bay, and kept calling for my mother, who was standing beside him, unable to calm and reassure him. He struggled to crawl out of bed, resisting the efforts to restrain him, trying to escape the inevitable, if only for another hour or two. He coded just before midnight.

He was lying in the morgue when Alice and I arrived from High Point at five in the morning. My mother was about to sign the consent to the autopsy to confirm the obvious, postoperative cardiac arrest, when I ripped the form from her hands and tore it to shreds.
He’s dead, he’s fucking dead. Why do you want to cut him up again?
My wife and mother and sister, for once, were silent in the face of my ferocity. The night before he was buried, I wrote him a long letter, recording every minute of every day of that week in Florida. I’m sure most of it happened just as I remembered. I slipped it in the pocket of his jacket before the undertaker closed the coffin lid. When I think of him now, he’s never old, feeble, broken. He’s that magnificent animal he was when I was a boy, the man I’ll never be, able to swat a baseball a hundred, thousand, million feet, then spit in his hands and do it again, never breaking a sweat.

“Hi. You remember me?”

He startles me, pulling me from my sentimental reverie.

He looks vaguely familiar. Ordinary. Could be a dozen different guys.

“I’m Harold. We met right before Thanksgiving.”

“Sure…sure. Hey, how you doing?” I say, determined not to be my usual rude self.

“You’re Andy, right?”

“Right.”

“Can I buy you a beer?”

“That’s great, but I really have to go. Someone’s waiting up for me,” I say.

“Your boyfriend?” he asks, his face sagging with disappointment.

“Believe it or not, my mother. I still have a curfew.” I laugh, a too-subtle joke at the expense of a man who’s way too old to be referring to anyone as a
boyfriend.

“Next time, then,” he says, obviously cheered by my revelation.

“Next time. It’ll be on me.”

Only once I’m in the car do I realize he was wearing a White Sox jersey. It comes back to me. He was the guy in the Tar Heels hoodie who gave me a chaste kiss last November. What a doofus, I think, smiling. Wonder what he’d think about my encounter with the Great DiMaggio? I’ll have to remember to tell him if I ever see him again.

I
t sounds beautiful, the way the oncologist describes it. A warm, pulsing, living thing. Organic. Almost musical. If I were an artist, I’d draw it on a field of blue. The lymph system. Thin, pliant tubes, the body’s interstate system, a highway conveying precious lymph—colorless, watery—from spleen to tissue, from farm to market. Think of your nodes as pit stops along the way, bustling with activity, generating cells, an arsenal for the war against infection.

My mind wanders. Why haven’t I ever seen lymph? Cut your finger, you get blood. What happens to lymph when that same paring knife severs a lymph vessel? Where does it go?

Blood also has a verb. Bleed.

Lymph is only a noun. No one ever asks if you’re lymphing.

I’ve never heard of anyone lymphing to death.

It’s a mystery, this lymph. To you, to me, to my mother. But not to the trained eye of the pathologist peering into the microscope, classifying the node cells harvested in the biopsy into a familiar pattern.

The lymph node shows a diffuse lymphocytic infiltrate with occasional residual nonneoplastic germinal centers. The lymphocyctic infiltrate is composed of small cells with scant cytoplasm and irregular, cleaved nuclei (hematoxylin-eosin 40x, x 400 and Wright-Geimsa x 1000).

Wow. Dig that crazy medical lingo, Maynard G. Krebs. Sounds cool to me.

But not to the oncologist reading the report. Not from the look on her face, the slight knotting of her eyebrows.

Lymphoma, she says. Pretty word, I think, meant to be modified by adjectives like
languorous
or lazy, nice phonetic matches, synonyms of
indolent
. Indolent lymphoma. All we need to do is Watch and Wait. Odds are better of being killed in a car wreck or a terrorist attack than succumbing to your mutant cells. Right?

Sorry, the oncologist says, the cell pattern indicates adult lymphoblastic lymphoma.

I don’t think I like what all those syllables imply.

An aggressive lymphoma, she explains.

Uh-oh. Aggressive. Rapid action. Carnivorous cells attacking poor, defenseless tissue with their sharp little teeth. Snip, bite, chew, spit. How much have they already eaten? What’s left?

The oncologist asks the receptionist to bring in coffee. There’s Danish left from the morning staff meeting. Please, help yourself. We’re having a tea party, the oncologist, my mother, and me. The doctor slips her stockinged feet out of her pumps. It’s all so cozy in here.

Staging. That’s the next step, she says. Determine the spread. Let’s start with some bloods, draw a little bone marrow, order a CT scan to get a peek inside the body. Now, depending on the results, we may have to consider a laparotomy to…

My mother twitches, a reflex. She must have misheard. She thinks the doctor said lobotomy. No, I assure her. Or maybe I misheard.

…that’s actually a surgical procedure. We make an incision in the belly so we can get to the internal organs. We take little snips to view under the microscope. Not likely we’ll have to go that far. The bloods and marrow hopefully will be sufficient and it won’t be necessary.

The early reviews come in. It’s necessary.

So we pack a little bag, just enough for a night or two, maybe three, and I whisk her away to the hospital.

Should I call my sister? She knows nothing yet. What if my mother dies on the table? What if she never wakes up from the anesthesia? Regina will never forgive me for denying her the opportunity to participate in the death watch, to share the ritual.

But wait a minute. It’s just a test. Just a little exploration, just harvesting a few clippings for the laboratory. My mother will be home in a few days, her biggest worry being the new tinkle in her car engine and whether she remembered to turn off the sprinkler.

But she’s got
it
.

That much we do know.

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

It’s just a question of how far it’s gone.

And now we know it’s gone far enough that they need to slice open her belly to determine the spread.

My sister has a right to know.

No, my mother says, no need for her to worry yet. Let’s not give it to her in dribs and drabs. I’ll tell her when I know everything there is to know.

Besides, I think, my sister would never appreciate the beauty of the lymph system. Its silent mysteries are beyond her comprehension. She’s too literal minded. She’s a real estate broker. Only hard facts are meaningful. Mortgage lending rates. Tax assessments. Comparables. There’s plenty of time in the days ahead to reduce my mother’s diagnosis to tangibles—treatments, side effects, diet, support groups—that Regina can grasp with her fist, bite down on, snap in two.

My mother absentmindedly scratches her freshly shaved belly. I tell her I’ll be back in the morning, before they take her downstairs. I kiss her good night. Just a peck on the cheek. Nothing melodramatic. After all, it’s just a test.

She scores four out of a possible four.

Great! That means she’s won!

Sorry, it means she lost.

Stage IV.

The cancer has spread beyond the lymph system. Multiple organs are involved. An aggressive treatment regimen is recommended. Starting immediately. Yes, yes, I say before my mother can speak, answering for her, not allowing her any say in the matter, adamantly refusing to concede the possibility of a world without her.

Certain things are taken for granted; some basic assumptions go unquestioned. The sun will rise in the morning and set at night. The seasons will change. A year will pass and we’ll all be older. My mother will be there, ready to catch me if I fall and lead the charge whenever I’m challenged.

Ma, someday I’ll be ready to stand on my two feet. I promise. As soon as we get through this, all of this, cancer, divorce, scandal. I’m gonna stand by you, support you, be your rock. I can’t say I’m a raging success, but I wouldn’t have gotten even this far without you. And you, being who you are, will be kind and generous enough to pretend that all my efforts are for you when we both know you’re really just the beneficiary of my own fear of being left alone. But my motives aren’t important in the end; it doesn’t matter that I’m not Mother Teresa because I’m going to be here with you, the whole way, right up until the day they tell us you’ve got a clean bill of health and you’ll live to be ninety. I promise.

“It may not be a death sentence, Andy. Even the most aggressive lymphomas are responding to the newer treatment regimens. There’s a little bit of God in medicine these days.”

“That’s weird,” I say.

“Well, disease is a part of the natural order, but it always feels like a disruption of the natural order to those it affects.”

“No. I didn’t mean the disease is weird.”

Matt waits for me to elaborate.

“You’re a priest, you know,” I say.

“Yes, I certainly know that,” he says.

“And I’ve been seeing you since last summer.”

“Right.”

“And this is the first time you’ve brought up the subject of God.”

“You want to go somewhere with that thought?” he asks.

I feel a professional pause coming on, one of those eyes-locked silences intended to draw me out.

“Do you believe in God?” I ask.

“Of course I do.”

“You’ve never doubted?”

“Of course I have.”

“But you still believe?”

“Yes. I do.”

“I don’t.”

“I suspected as much.”

“Doesn’t that upset you?”

“Andy, I don’t make judgments about my patients’ religious beliefs or lack of them.”

“But you’re a priest!”

“Yes, I am. But that’s incidental to our work together.”

“How can that be?” I ask, not really certain why I’m so agitated. “How can you sit there and allow me to continue in my heathenish delusions? I thought it was your job to bring me back to God!”

“Andy, I’m not a missionary. I’m a shrink.”

“I didn’t think the Vatican let you compartmentalize,” I say, laughing. “See, I
have
been paying attention. I’m getting pretty facile with the lingo, huh?”

“So does being an atheist bother you?” he asks.

“Aha! See! I knew you’d get around to converting me! A leopard doesn’t change its spots!” I say, satisfied.

“Sorry, pal. It doesn’t matter to me if you believe in God or Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. But I’ve got this funny feeling it matters to you.”

“Think you know me pretty well, don’t you?”

“I’m beginning to,” he says.

“Maybe you are,” I concede. “But you’re wrong about this one. I’m not an atheist.”

“So you do believe?”

“I suppose.”

“What do you believe in?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just hedging my bets. Maybe I’m too much of a coward to make a commitment to heresy. I mean, maybe there is an Almighty Being and maybe there is a Saint Peter and I don’t want to get turned away at the Pearly Gates because I made the stupid mistake of thinking there isn’t a God.”

“Covering all your bases, huh?”

“Right. Anything wrong with that?”

“Not necessarily.”

“It’s not all about me, you know.”

Matt sits quietly, knowing where I’m headed.

“What if there aren’t any medical miracles? What happens to my mother if she dies? I’d rather think of her flying around heaven with a harp than lying in a box in the ground.”

“So you’re saying your mother is the reason you haven’t quite given up on God?”

“She’s one of the reasons.”

“Do you want to talk about your mother? About how you feel about this bad news?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to think about it. I haven’t thought about anything else. I just can’t think about it anymore. At least not now. And you’re right. Maybe it’s not worth thinking about at all. Maybe there’s a little bit of God in modern medicine after all. Maybe this time next year everything will be back to normal.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Tell you about what?”

“Tell me what it’s going to be like when everything’s back to normal.”

Goddamn it. This priest sure has a talent for stumping me.

Back to…what?

A Saturday night date with my mother at the club, then sleeping late in the morning while she putters in the kitchen, whipping up my favorite Sunday dinner?

Possible…but not normal.

Crawling into bed and drifting off to sleep while Alice rustles the pages of her novel?

Normal…but not possible.

“Andy, I think under the circumstances you need to concentrate on the present and not worry about the future. You need to focus on the positive to help you deal with the negative.”

“The positive?” I sneer.

“You’re a very lucky man, my friend.”

I snort, laughing.

“It almost makes me angry, your willful refusal to acknowledge what you have,” he says, his voice more measured than his words.

“And what would that be? A fat frequent flyer miles bank?”

“The knowledge that you are unconditionally loved. That’s a gift not everyone is given.”

“And now she’s gonna die.”

“That doesn’t die with her. That you will keep for as long as you live.”

I’m not taking a chance.

We’re going to get through this, Mama, if it’s the last thing we do.